Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should, Too)

Amid all the talk of 'leaning in' and 'having it all,' we've ignored the most powerful gender-equalizer.

Who's becoming a mom these days, and when? WSJ's Jason Bellini dives into the statistics to find some surprising trends.

By

Sarah Elizabeth Richards

May 3, 2013 7:16 p.m. ET

Between the ages of 36 and 38, I spent nearly $50,000 to freeze 70 eggs in the hope that they would help me have a family in my mid-40s, when my natural fertility is gone. For this baby insurance, I obliterated my savings and used up the money my parents had set aside for a wedding. It was the best investment I ever made.

Egg freezing stopped the sadness that I was feeling at losing my chance to have the child I had dreamed about my entire life. It soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn't want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn't sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.

I decided to freeze on the afternoon of my 36th birthday, when I did a fresh round of baby math on the back of a business card at Starbucks. Even if the man I was dating at the time agreed to start a family in the near future, I was cutting it close to have one baby, let alone a second. Several months later, after injecting myself for nearly two weeks with hormone shots, I was in surgery at a Manhattan fertility clinic as my doctor pierced my ovaries, suctioned out nine eggs and handed them to the embryologist to freeze until I was ready to use them. As soon as I woke up in the recovery room, I no longer felt as though I were watching my window to have a baby close by the month. My future seemed full of possibility again.

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Amid all the talk about women "leaning in" and "having it all," the conversation has left out perhaps the most powerful gender equalizer of all—the ability to control when we have children. The idea is tantalizing: Once you land the job and man you want, you can have your frozen eggs shipped to your fertility clinic, hand him a semen collection cup and be on your way to parenthood. You mitigate the risk of birth defects by using younger eggs, and you can carry a baby well into middle age. At a time when one in five American women between the ages of 40 and 44 is childless—and half say they would still like to have children—egg freezing offers a once-unimaginable reprieve.

Up until now, a woman who bumped up against her baby deadline could visit a sperm bank, make peace with being "child-free" or eventually break her heart and bank pursuing futile fertility treatments in an attempt to "snatch a child from the jaws of menopause," as the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett so famously warned a decade ago while encouraging women to plan their families as carefully as their careers.

I spent the majority of my 30s alternately panicked about my love life or feeling kicked in the gut every time I saw an adorable child. Fertility anxiety isn't exactly helpful when you're trying to snag the locker next to Sheryl Sandberg in the executive gym. And it's a buzz kill on dates when you feel compelled to ask the guy sitting across from you, clutching his craft beer, "So do you think you might want kids someday?"

ENLARGE

Cost of egg freezing per cycle: $9,000-$13,000.
Mackenzie Stroh

Although egg freezing has been available in the U.S. for nearly a decade, it has only recently entered the mainstream. Last fall, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the procedure's experimental label, citing improved success rates with a new flash-freezing technology known as vitrification. Several trials showed little difference in in-vitro-fertilization success rates using frozen rather than fresh eggs. That rate is 30% to 50% per try, depending on the age of eggs and expertise of the doctor. Despite early fears of how freezing could damage eggs' chromosomes, a recent review of 900 babies born from frozen eggs found they had no more risk of birth defects than those conceived naturally.

The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology only recently starting collecting data on egg freezing and doesn't yet publish them. But doctors are reporting that their patient loads have surged. At NYU Langone Medical Center, which has one of the oldest and largest programs in the country, more than 1,200 women have undergone the procedure since 2003 for nonmedical reasons, and two-thirds of those were in the past few years.

The age of patients is slowly coming down, too. One review of 240 women seeking consultations about fertility preservation at Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York between 2005 and 2011 found the average age had dropped from 39 to 37. Several doctors say they are seeing a trickle of women under 35—the turning point when a woman's fertility goes downhill and she is labeled "advanced maternal age" on medical charts.

Celebrities are getting in on the act. Last month, "Modern Family" television actress Sofia Vergara, 40, announced she had frozen her eggs. In the ultimate stamp of approval, Kim Kardashian—then 31 and not yet pregnant with Kanye West's baby—wondered aloud last year on her reality show whether she should freeze.

Despite its promise, however, there is still a lot wrong with egg freezing. At $9,000 to $13,000 a cycle (not including the drugs or storage), the cost is prohibitively high for most women and is rarely covered by insurance or paid for by employers. Plus, doctors lack critical experience in making babies this way. According to a recent survey of U.S. fertility clinics that offer egg freezing, nearly half of doctors had never thawed a patient's eggs to attempt a pregnancy. Even in the best of hands, there's a real chance your frozen eggs might not work when you decide to start your family.

Critics of "social freezing" say that biological deadlines serve a purpose in life: Without them, a woman would have little incentive to sit through dozens of Match.com dates to find a partner and father for her children. But the women I've talked to didn't use their frozen fertility as an excuse to date their DVRs. In fact, they said that egg freezing motivated them to take charge of their lives. They relaxed. They dated, married and thawed. They became ready to be mothers.

When a woman freezes her eggs, two things happen: She comes to terms with the fact that her fertility is fading, and she invests significant time, energy and money in protecting that asset by seeking medical help. The combination puts the issue front and center and makes you commit to your goals. Although I have always known I wanted to be a mother, I will admit that I indulged my ambivalent side at age 34 by falling in love with a man who wasn't sure he wanted kids. After months of couples therapy and weekly summits in which we made flow charts of the pros and cons of having children, my "maybe" man became a "no" man. With little time to find another partner before my fertility plummeted, I jumped at the opportunity to freeze my eggs. But after writing a check for $13,000 and enduring countless doctor's visits, blood draws and hormone shots, I could not bear to return to the "no" guy and the sleepy stupor of hoping it would all work out.

I forced myself to break up with a man I loved. Then I became so focused on securing a real safety net that I researched ways to save money by freezing several batches in Montreal to take advantage of lower Canadian health costs, and I bought cheaper Spanish fertility drugs through an online British pharmacy. When you are lying naked on a cold operating table in a foreign country while a stranger tries to harvest—egg by precious egg—the last of your fertility, you truly own your desire to be a mom.

‘Far from encouraging women to wait, I found that egg freezing made it easier for women to relax and find a partner.’

The act of egg freezing also has the effect of making women feel more in control of their dating lives. Months after freezing her eggs, 37-year-old Monica became frustrated with her lackluster dating prospects. She joined an online dating site and received so many inquiries she decided to manage her pipeline as she would a work project, making an Excel spreadsheet of every man in play. Next to a thumbnail photo she copied from the site, she would list each prospect's age, education level, number of family members, hometown, what they had talked about on dates, personality traits she liked and whether she owed him an email or a phone call. She organized the information on one page and carried around her fact sheet so that she could refer to it during unexpected calls. To make sure she protected her precious free time for men who were serious about her, she decided to tell dates upfront that she was looking to settle down and have children. Dozens of blind dates later, she was in a committed relationship with someone who wanted the same things as she did.

In the case of Kelly, going through the freezing process didn't accelerate her dating campaign; it made her slow down. Instead of panicking over finding a partner, she decided to catch her breath. After ending a long relationship and freezing her eggs at age 39, Kelly decided to forgo dating to focus on self-improvement. She wanted to develop confidence in her judgment to pick a good partner and sharpen her ability to quickly end relationships that weren't working, so she didn't waste more time with the wrong guy. Her counterintuitive logic: Taking a break from dating was actually a better strategy to help her make progress toward her goals. When she developed a satisfying single life and learned how to be content without a partner, she found herself ready to welcome one into her life.

From Review

In my case, egg freezing gave me the confidence to go back on Match.com at nearly 40 and proudly tell men "I can have kids whenever I want. It feels so nice not to have to rush relationships." Eight months ago, I met a wonderful 45-year-old single dad who wants more kids and wanted to hear all about my frozen eggs. Four hours after meeting at a New York wine bar, we were kissing in Central Park in a warm September foggy mist. I don't know if it is me or the eggs, but I am more relaxed in this relationship than I have ever been in my life. And I have since updated my baby math: If I don't get pregnant on my own within the next year or so, I plan to thaw my eggs and hopefully give birth to my first child at 44 and maybe a second by 46.

Doctors sometimes fret that women who freeze their eggs will have a tendency to wait to thaw their eggs until after their natural fertility is gone. But as soon as 42-year-old Kelly's boyfriend proposed marriage, she didn't waste any time planning the rest of her family. Her doctor recommended thawing her frozen eggs first; if they didn't work, Kelly still had a chance of getting pregnant with her fresh eggs. Then she got to work organizing her wedding. Shortly after her honeymoon, nine of Kelly's 19 frozen eggs were thawed, injected with her husband's sperm and transferred to her uterus. Although she admitted that she would have preferred to have more time to enjoy being married before delving into motherhood, she was mindful of the ticking clock.

Another concern is that women will push the age of motherhood to an extreme, endure more difficult pregnancies, risk premature labor and deny their children the chance of spending much, if any, time with their grandparents. But women understand that, even with frozen eggs, they don't have forever. At age 44, Hannah began to worry about her creeping age and finally nudged her husband to make a decision to have more children. They thawed her eggs, and she became pregnant with Sophia Grace on the first try.

One surprising effect of egg freezing is that it makes women more open to using science to explore alternate routes to creating their families. One woman decided to stop waiting for the right man at the right moment and explored using donor sperm to have a baby on her own, using her frozen eggs. And several other women who began the egg-freezing process firmly opposed to using donor eggs turned to those when their own failed.

There is another benefit of egg-freezing technology that many people don't know about: If your own frozen eggs don't survive thawing or fertilization or fail to grow into robust embryos, you can go online to one of the many commercial egg banks popping up across the country and order a batch of frozen eggs donated by a woman who looks like you. After they are injected with your partner's sperm, the resulting embryos can be transferred to your womb, and you deliver and nurse the baby.

In short, instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars for a donor to undergo the egg-stimulation process, you can buy her eggs piecemeal for a couple of thousand dollars each. A survey published last month in Fertility & Sterility found that more than 3,100 eggs are for sale from nearly 300 donors at seven such clinics. It is not the perfect backup plan, but for a woman who wants to experience pregnancy and childbirth and for a man who cares about passing on his DNA, it is not a bad one, either. No matter what happens in women's lives—divorce, layoffs, illness, ambivalence—egg freezing can come to the rescue.

Over the course of my research, I was surprised to discover how much more common it was for younger women to think about freezing their eggs. Last year, I met two women who were wrestling with turning 30 and worked at the prestigious management-consulting firm McKinsey. One was single and the other had a long-term boyfriend. But they had the same point of view: Egg freezing gave them options for fitting a family into their work lives and time to meet a future partner.

In the future, a woman who registers for law or medical school—and knows ahead of time that she will spend her prime baby-making years in the trenches—would ask for loans for tuition and egg freezing at the same time. Or she might ask a boyfriend who wants to wait a few years to start a family to pony up for the procedure. In either scenario, she would assume control of her fertility from the outset, rather than freeze her eggs as a frenzied reaction to her life's not having unfolded the way she imagined.

We are witnessing an unprecedented time in history. Women have enjoyed more opportunity in nearly every area of their lives, except the ability to have children. We undoubtedly will be trying to navigate this mismatch for generations to come, but if technology can temporarily compensate by adding another layer of choice, that is a reprieve indeed.

—Ms. Richards is the author of "Motherhood Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It," to be published by Simon and Schuster on May 7.

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